Britain is in population crisis and millions more are set to come

Poor Birmingham always tends to be used to illustrate the effects of population growth but so dramatic is the latest forecast that the city, which has 1.1 million residents, is no longer a sufficient unit of measurement.

In the next 25 years the population of the UK is set to increase by nearly 10million

Over the next 25 years, if the Office for National Statistics (ONS) is correct, we will need a new London as well as another Birmingham. By 2040, reckons the ONS, the population of the UK will have grown from the current 64.6million to 74.3 million, an increase of 9.7 million. The population of London is 8.6 million.

To visualise how Britain will change over the next quarter century you have to imagine a whole new urban area stretching from Barnet to Croydon, from Hounslow to Romford, dumped somewhere in the countryside.

Some population growth is a good thing. It would be bad news if the population was shrinking as it is in Germany and many Eastern European countries. A declining population is usually a sign of a falling birth rate and an exodus of young people leaving behind an elderly population.

Related articles

But population growth in Britain is at the opposite extreme. It is at a level beyond which our infrastructure and public services can cope and which is going to mean an intolerable loss of green space in an already overcrowded country.

For years governments have been viewing population figures rather like Nelson viewed enemy ships at the Battle of Trafalgar: they pretend not to see because they don’t want to admit the reality.

The difference is that Nelson had a secret strategy. The planners who are supposed to be in charge of public services don’t. They are treating everything as if the population is static or rising gently.

Take housing. Over the past year 160,000 new homes have been built across the UK yet the population expanded by 491,000. The expansion of housing stock is not even enough to cope with the extra people, let alone with the additional demand for housing created by a decline in the average household size.

GETTY

The popultion has grown by 491,000 and in the same time only 160,000 houses have been built

The result is many thousands of people, mostly migrants, living in insanitary conditions. Because of the mismatch between what has been planned for and what is happening we are reinventing the slums.

Migration isn’t the whole of the story: the population is expanding partly because we are living longer. But the ONS was very clear: 51 per cent of its projected increase in population is accounted for by migration.

Predictably the BBC yesterday wheeled out one of its frequent advocates of opendoor migration, Christian Dustmann of University College London, to argue that migration was the good part of the population story.

Migrants grow the economy and pay taxes, he asserted, while an ageing population is a burden. But that is far too simplistic. The problem of an ageing population is already being mitigated by raising the retirement age.

Over the next 20 years the state retirement age will rise from 65 to 68, extending millions of working lives. There are huge numbers of migrants, on the other hand, who are far from a net asset to the economy.

Some are not working and yet are allowed under EU rules to claim benefits. Many bring dependents but even when they leave their families behind the UK taxpayer is paying child benefit for those being raised in other countries.

Even if every migrant was contributing to the economy the scale of migration would still require a huge change to the physical appearance of Britain and to the condition of the environment.

At the projected rate of growth South-east England will over the course of our lifetimes have to become one vast urban area. We have never had any debate as to what this will mean to the quality of life nor to the flora and fauna.

GETTY

David Cameron is living in a fantasy over migration

It is an issue which has simply been placed in the “too difficult to contemplate” pile. The Government is failing to cope with population growth because in David Cameron’s fantasy, net migration is always about to fall to the “tens of thousands a year”, as promised before the 2010 election.

It was a daft promise given that he knew he had no way of reducing migration from within the EU unless he could persuade the other member states to change the rules or Britain left the EU. But the EU will not change the rules and neither will David Cameron countenance leaving.

We should quite properly focus on the benefits and problems for Britain but it isn’t just overpopulated Britain which suffers. While we struggle to cope with the extra people the likes of Romania and Bulgaria are struggling with depopulation: they are losing young people leaving behind ageing populations.

How much better had the EU done what it should have done and delayed extending the rights of free movement to the new Eastern European states until their economies had reached more of a parity with those of Western Europe.

At that stage we wouldn’t have had to worry about migration because the numbers coming here would be more balanced with people leaving to start lives elsewhere. Instead we have had mass population growth foisted upon us, the consequences of which are steadily becoming clear.